It's using solar energy as input, where's the fossil fuels?
This development is exciting and hopefully spreads everywhere. Farmers being able to make their own fertilizer (at least on the nitrogen side), is a huge win.
This development is exciting and hopefully spreads everywhere. Farmers being able to make their own fertilizer (at least on the nitrogen side), is a huge win.
Before people could pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere, wars were fought over guano deposits, etc.
At this point, the majority of nitrogen in human biomass comes from the Haber-Bosch process.
(I’m not arguing against composting, to be clear!)
In medieval times most of the population were farmers by necessity. In the UK, output per acre tripled and the proportion of the population in farming went from 60% to 20% in 1840. And the UK was still almost entirely self sufficient at this time, food imports only became substantial in the late 1800s.
Similar changes happened across Europe, though timing varied by country with the spread of industrialisation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolut...
Again, not commenting on the merits of this technology, I just think it's not correct to say that composting can't scale.
The Germans pioneered modern fertilizer production in the 1890s-1910s.
And if you compare the distribution of these solar panels with the distribution of the equivalent amount of nitrogen produced, I bet the panels require a lot less carbon for transportation. Not to mention not relying on a nitrogen producer (Russia), and additional uses for the panels.
Just like in algorithms, making it an O(1) rather than O(n) solution, even with a large constant factor, can make an enormous difference over time.
Also suspect modern agriculture's conviction that the crop is an empty vessel requiring synthetic fertilizer is long overdue for reconsideration. Organic ag can be as productive as industrial ag, at far less energy/materials cost, but it will require much more human effort. While this is a very serious tradeoff to make I would argue it is worthwhile in the long run.